Books of the Times

By John Leonard

Published: July 16, 1981

HOW CAN I KEEP FROM SINGING: PETE SEEGER. By David King Dunaway. Illustrated. 386 pages. McGraw-Hill. $14.95.

HE went to Harvard, this 62-year-old man who still thinks you can change the world with a song and a sailboat. At Harvard, he studied sociology because they wouldn't let him study journalism. He also joined the Young Communist League. If he hadn't dropped out of Harvard after two years, he would have been graduated with the class of '40, just like John F. Kennedy.

His father went to Harvard before him. And his sister dropped out of Radcliffe. What I am saying is that the Seegers didn't come out of the woods or the bayous or the Dust Bowl. They were an old New England family that went back to the Mayflower. They had been religious dissenters and they had been abolitionists before they became folk singers. Pete Seeger has always described himself, and has been described by his friends, as a Puritan: he doesn't smoke, he doesn't drink, he disapproves of gambling and there is every reason to believe that he was innocent of sex until he married Toshi Ohta, his wife of 40 years. Encouraged by Father

Pete's father, Charles Seeger, was the most important person in his life except, of course, for Toshi and Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie. Charles Seeger was a musicologist who had been radically traumatized by an experience with the Industrial Workers of the World. Pete's mother, Constance, was a violinist. A banjo is probably not what they had in mind. But his father seems to have encouraged him in his music and in his politics, at least until the House Committee on Un-American Activities raised such a fuss.

He needed encouragement. He tried to make a living as an artist, mostly by painting barns and exchanging the paintings for food with the local farmers. He tried journalism, and couldn't get a job in Depression New York. He joined the Communist Party, just in time to lose the Spanish Civil War. He traveled with a puppet show. There was always the banjo, but could it serve the Revolution? Then he met Leadbelly, and after Leadbelly, Alan Lomax, and after Lomax, Woody Guthrie. He was introduced to the protest song, the sea chanty, the ballad of the road, the blues, and so on.

Pete and Woody would travel together on a memorable trip from New York to Texas, singing for their supper. From this and other trips he would fashion his first big dream of choruses in every union hall and wandering song leaders to get everybody in the right (or left) frame of mind; we would have a singing revolution, based on old American tunes and new American fighting words. He got back to New York to play an indispensable role - he has never lacked energy - in a folk-music movement that was more ''citybilly'' than Okie. Nevertheless, the Almanac Singers, who maintained anonymity, were on their way.

The Almanacs - I am listening to them now sing ''We Shall Overcome'' - were broken up the first time by World War II and their own Communist Party. The Almanacs specialized in peace and disarmament songs, before Germany invaded the Soviet Union. It took Pete a while to learn to write war songs, and by the time he managed it he was drafted and sent to Saipan.

After the war, he put his formidable energies to work in seven directions, including his own music, an Almanac commune that had to depend too much on his talent to support itself, and a national songpublishing scheme that would supply the old and the new to every union in the country. The publishing scheme went bankrupt, the unions were no longer interested in radical activity, the commune lost heat and heart as the Cold War coagulated.

The rest of the historical material should be familiar to anyone interested in folk music: building a cabin and leaving the Party; the formation of the Weavers and their success in night clubs and on radio; the Congressional committees and the long blacklists; Mr. Seeger's finding his own new constituency in colleges and schools; another crackdown and more blacklisting; a new generation of singers and sing-a-longers in the 1960's, with Bob Dylan and Joan Baez and Tom Paxton and Judy Collins, all indebted to Mr. Seeger; the civilrights and antiwar movements, in which he was deeply and typically involved; and then the ugly end of the 60's, when his own ''children'' turned on him, accusing him of being too tame and too optimistic as he turned his attention to environmentalism. A Survivor

He survived, as those of us who take our children to see him at Carnegie Hall every year can attest. This is a very long book that could have been three times longer. It is a portrait of a Pete Seeger who is surprisingly troubled, defensive, shy, disappointed and rather humorless - not at all the man our children meet onstage or in his summer camps. It is an account of the revival and commercialization of folk music. It is an uneasy pop history of Congressional witch-hunting and Communist Party lickspittle.

David King Dunaway, who teaches folklore and American studies at the University of New Mexico, had access to Mr. Seeger's letters, files and a voluminous personal journal. He seems to have interviewed almost everybody pertinent to the matter, and yet still hasn't made up his mind about the man, and doesn't even seem sure about the music. Does he really think rock is more political and more effective than folk? Could he really get only a single quotation from Mr. Seeger on the subject of Stalin? (''A hard driver.'') Is environmentalism ''tame'' or not? If the children of the 60's did eat their fathers, like Mr. Seeger and Paul Goodman, were they different from the children of any other decade? Won't they, in their turn, be munched on? All is left dangling, broken strings.